Meredith Fischer's Choice

The Life of Bram Fischer
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-86842-719-2
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

Martin Meredith documents the remarkable life of Bram Fischer in his biography Fischer's Choice. Fischer was born into an aristocratic Afrikaans family but became one of South Africa's leading revolutionaries. Regarded in his youth as having a brilliant career ahead of him, he rebelled not only against the apartheid system but also against his own Afrikaner people. As a defence lawyer, Fischer managed to save Mandela from the death penalty demanded by state prosecutors for his sabotage activities. He played a remarkable role in the underground movement aimed at overthrowing the government. To the very last, even when all the other conspirators had been arrested or fled into exile, Fischer held out, sought for months by the security police. His single-handed efforts ended inevitably in failure. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was cast into solitary confinement, the government continued to regard him as a potentially dangerous influence even when he was dying of cancer, refusing all appeals to release him until the last few weeks of his life. Set against the dramatic background of two massive historical struggles, one by the Afrikaans, the other by the Africans, Fischer's life contains all the ingredients of a political thriller.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meredith, Martin

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

BLOEMFONTEIN

Bram Fischer was born into one of the most distinguished Afrikaner families in the Orange Free State. The Fischers were part of the white elite in Bloemfontein, a small but increasingly prosperous town lying on the great plains north of the Orange River, which served as the capital for the young Afrikaner republic during the nineteenth century. Bram’s grandfather, Abraham Fischer, had arrived there in 1875, a newly qualified lawyer moving north from the Cape Town area where the Fischers had settled in the eighteenth century. His young wife, Ada Robertson, was the daughter of Scottish immigrants whom he had married two years before.

The Fischers soon established a prominent role in political and social life. They acquired an imposing double-storey mansion, Fern Lodge, with spacious gardens running down to the Bloemfontein Spruit, and a farm a few miles north of the town which they called Hillandale. Abraham was elected to the Volksraad, the Orange Free State parliament, where he was much valued for his wise counsel. They entertained in a grand manner both in their townhouse and at their farm. Every year they gave a huge banquet for members of the Volksraad. They were renowned too for their play productions: Abraham painted the stage scenery and directed the plays.

Their farm, Hillandale, was a place of special importance to them. The house they built there stood on a rocky kopje overlooking the plains. Abraham Fischer delighted in planting trees, particularly willows and karees, in tending his orchards and taking long, rambling walks through the bush. At Christmas time, the Fischers would give a lunch for a score of guests, setting out tables under the almond trees. Tennis and croquet parties were a regular event. At the Fischers’ silver wedding anniversary in October 1898, 100 guests came to Hillandale to celebrate, among them President Martinus Steyn and his wife.

Bloemfontein too flourished during these years. The first railway from the Cape Colony opened in 1890. A new parliament building the Raadzaal – was inaugurated in 1893, sufficiently grand for what was termed a ‘model Republic’. During the 1890s, new schools, a hospital, a post office building and a club were constructed. While Bloemfontein remained essentially a small town, with a white population numbering only about 2 500, it possessed a cosmopolitan atmosphere, with its own orchestra, church and choral societies, language study circles, Shakespeare readings, dances and amateur theatricals, parks and public gardens. Visitors from Europe were given a warm welcome. Although only Dutch was permitted in the Volksraad, English was commonly spoken in town and business life. The writer Anthony Trollope once described Bloemfontein as the most ‘English’ town he had visited in southern Africa.

All this, however, was overshadowed by the growing threat of war. The discovery of gold in 1886 had turned the neighbouring Afrikaner republic of the Transvaal into the richest state in southern Africa and made Britain, then at the peak of its imperial fortunes, ambitious to gain control. An attempted coup d’état in 1895, engineered by mining magnates with the connivance of British ministers, failed ignominiously, but Britain nevertheless remained intent on extending the realms of its empire.

As the threat of war drew closer, Abraham Fischer, with his long white beard and glass eye that he had worn since a boyhood accident, became an increasingly central figure in the drama. Appointed by President Steyn to the executive council of the Orange Free State in 1896, he was constantly on the move, endeavouring to work out a negotiated settlement between the two sides. In Pretoria, President Kruger urged him to join the Transvaal government as state secretary, but Fischer was wary of the ‘queer folk’ who surrounded Kruger and the corruption rife in his regime, and declined to take on the job. He was equally distrustful of the British high commissioner, Lord Milner, who seemed to him to be bent on war whatever the cost.

When Kruger and Milner met for the first time at the presidency in Bloemfontein in May 1899, Fischer was present as one of the principal negotiators. To ensure that they were comfortably accommodated, Gustav Fichardt, a wealthy businessman, offered Milner his house, Kayalami, as a residence, while his son, Charlie Fichardt, made his double-storeyed house in Elizabeth Street available to Kruger. But despite the pleasantries, nothing was accomplished. For several months longer, Fischer and Steyn strove to avoid conflict, but to no avail.

As he was driving in his carriage across Market Square in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, shortly before war broke out, Fischer stopped briefly to tell Gustav Fichardt how negotiations were progressing. ‘We have given the last concession we possibly can,’ he said. ‘If war comes now, even I, who have worked so hard for peace, would feel justified in going out to fight – if with my one eye I would be of any use.’

Even though the risks of defeat were high, when members of the Free State Volksraad met in secret to decide whether to stand together with their fellow Afrikaners in the Transvaal to defy the might of the British army, their view was unanimous, as Fischer recorded. ‘There was no bounce or grootpraat [boasting] but quiet determination, and the spontaneous and unmistakable enthusiasm with which the members burst out into the Volkslied [the national anthem] was something to remember. They were all most cheerful learning that the best had been done to avert war and that they were unjustly being dragged into it.’

The Fischer family was scattered by the tide of war. In March 1900, Abraham Fischer, accompanied by his wife, Ada, sailed from Portuguese East Africa for Europe as part of an official delegation seeking support for the Boer cause from European governments, and they were unable to return home until after the war had ended. Their elder son, Harry, who was then 25 years old, served in Boer commandos in the Orange Free State, before being taken prisoner. Their younger son, Percy, Bram’s father, who was then 21 years old, was meanwhile studying law at Cambridge University, a student in enemy territory constantly fretting at missing the action with his compatriots.

Bloemfontein meanwhile became an occupied town under the control of a large British garrison. By British edict, the Orange Free State was renamed the Orange River Colony. The Fischers’ townhouse, Fern Lodge, was commandeered by the British authorities. Their English governess, Nakie Smith, who had remained behind, later described how British soldiers occupying the house had torn up editions of Dickens to stuff their pillows with the pages. Their farm, Hillandale, was turned into a British supply depot.

The war brought devastation to the Orange Free State and the Transvaal on an appalling scale. Faced with guerrilla warfare for which they were ill-prepared, British military commanders resorted to a scorched earth strategy in which Boer villages were razed to the ground, thousands of Boer farmsteads destroyed, and cattle and sheep slaughtered or carried away in such numbers that by the end of the war the Boers of the Orange Free State had lost half of their herds, and those in the Transvaal three-quarters. In a despatch to London in 1901, Lord Milner described the Orange Free State as ‘virtually a desert’.

Women and children were rounded up and placed in what the British called concentration camps. The site of the Bloemfontein camp was at Spitskop, a hillside two miles from the town where hundreds of women and children were dumped in tents on a barren stretch of veldt without any trees or shade. Conditions in the concentration camps, like the one at Spitskop, were so primitive that some 26 000 Boers died there from disease and malnutrition, most of them children under the age of 16.

The aftermath of the war was made even more bitter by Milner’s determined efforts to anglicise the Boer population. At Milner’s insistence, English was made the official language, even though Boers outnumbered British. In the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal the whole education system was swept away and replaced by an English-dominated one. But rather than submit to Milner’s schemes, Afrikaner leaders founded their own private schools which used Dutch as well as English as a medium of instruction, and promoted a sense of Afrikaner national consciousness among students. By the time Milner left South Africa in 1905, all that he had achieved was a depth of hostility among Afrikaners greater than anything that had existed before the war, and the stirrings of a new Afrikaner nationalism.

A change of government in Britain later that year led to a more enlightened policy. By 1906, only four years after a devastating war of conquest, Britain agreed to hand back the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal as self-governing territories. And in November 1907, after a general election, a new government in Bloemfontein was sworn in. Its prime minister was Abraham Fischer.

Percy Fischer, meanwhile, had returned from Cambridge to embark on his own career as a lawyer. As well as establishing a law practice, he lectured at the local college. In April 1907 he married Ella Fichardt, the younger daughter of Gustav Fichardt, whom he had known since childhood. The marriage linked two of the most prominent families in Bloemfontein. An immigrant from Germany, Gustav Fichardt had developed his supply store into the most prestigious and profitable business in Bloemfontein. At the outbreak of war, the firm of...